T-shirt sites fill a niche for a day

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TeeFury CEO Sam Bruni aims to sell more than 1 million T-shirts this year. TeeFury is a 5-year-old Orange County business that puts only one shirt on sale each day for $11 before retiring it. The shirts are designed by artists with concepts taken straight from geek culture -- mashups of video games, sci-fi, comic book and other characters.

TeeFury CEO Sam Bruni aims to sell more than 1 million T-shirts this year. The shirts are designed by artists with concepts taken straight from geek culture -- mashups of video games, sci-fi, comic book and other characters.

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Eva Trejo, of Santa Ana, helps to ship the daily T-shirt selections at the TeeFury warehouse in Irvine.

Sam Bruni, the muscular, 38-year-old CEO of Irvine’s TeeFury, was working out when a fellow exerciser complimented him on his shirt.

It featured the unmistakable outline of Princess Leia in her revealing bikini from “Return of the Jedi,” over text written in a style that might be used to advertise a Chinese restaurant: “Jabba’s Palace.” The shirt even featured restaurant specials – “Bounty Hunter Breakfast Buffet” – and an address, in the Dune Sea of Tatooine.

Sold online for $11 by Bruni’s company for one day only, the T-shirt is something only a “Star Wars” aficionado could truly appreciate. (Jabba’s actual palace, of course, is a gangster’s hangout on Tatooine where the princess in question is kept on a leash.) The reaction of the gym guy is precisely why TeeFury is still in business after five years, and looking for ways to expand from its niche.

Groupon and LivingSocial pioneered the daily deals landscape, taking advantage of overstocked warehouses needing to offload excess inventory or a local business hoping to get bodies in the door with a half-price coupon. But lately those outfits have struggled. Groupon’s CEO resigned in March after the stock price dropped to a quarter of its IPO price. LivingSocial, which counts Amazon as a major investor, was still losing money as of this spring. And Irvine-based Local Corp. abandoned the business last week, selling Spreebird, the deals site it launched in 2011.

Still plugging along are smaller, specialized deals sites offering clothing, accessories, gadgets and various household items, such as photo frames or shoe soles. That includes TeeFury and Sevenly, an Orange County company that peddles its own $22 artist-designed T-shirt designs for seven days, with $7 per shirt going to a different charity each week.

Sevenly, which launched in 2011 and grew to 20 employees in Fullerton, moved late last year into a larger office in Costa Mesa with 41 people. Another move is anticipated next year. The company says it is on track to earn $9 million in revenue this year.

So far, Sevenly has donated nearly $2.5 million to charities with shirts that are intricately designed in-house to reflect a different goal each week. “Water is a right” was the design that raised $10,800 for Thirst Relief International, which drills clean water wells in developing countries.

“Pets are family” raised nearly $30,000 for The Humane Society. Each was sold exclusively on the company’s website, sevenly.org.

In February the company started expanding its product line, including three designs each week as well as selling jewelry and other accessories.

“We want to give our customers more options to express their generous lifestyle,” said Ryan Wood, head of customer acquisition.

The challenge for TeeFury (teefury.com) is to figure out how to expand beyond impulse shoppers, said Bruni, who took over as CEO in February after running other daily deals sites.

“Impulse shopping on a deals site isn’t the easiest way to shop,” he said. “It’s kind of a guessing game. You’re not going to go there and say, ‘I’m going to buy a gift for my mom tomorrow’ and buy tomorrow’s shirt. That’s where we need to expand our thinking.”

Fans of “Star Trek,” “Game of Thrones,” “Doctor Who,” Japanese anime, Disney characters and dozens of other television shows, albums and movies can find a different shirt each day on TeeFury that plays off some inside joke. The artists and company rely on parody, which provides legal protection for unlicensed artistic designs inspired by the various properties.

The designs come from artists all over the world who get $1 per shirt sold. The highest-selling shirt – topping 10,000 sales in one day – mashed together characters from a popular series of Japanese animated films directed by Hayao Miyazaki. This year, the company aims to sell well over 1 million shirts.

TeeFury turns away dozens of design submissions each day. Artists whose work is selected can later sell their designs on their own websites, usually for much more than the price on TeeFury. That stokes demand for the 24-hour, $11 specials. On the site, a timer ticks down each minute until the deal expires.

“If it’s not something you’re passionate about, it’s not going to resonate with customers,” said Tom Kurzanski, who designed several TeeFury shirts and is now art director at the company.

As Bruni looks for ways to branch out, he’s reaching out to artists who had their shirt on TeeFury in the past to see if they want to offer their shirts again on an ongoing basis through TeeFury, but at $18 each. He’s tried pitting two shirts against each other on the same day as a kind of competition (which fan base, “Star Trek” or “Star Wars,” can buy more shirts?). He’s bringing in-house services that were originally outsourced, and looking into putting designs on other kinds of clothing.

“We’re trying to grow the business very aggressively,” Bruni said.

“We cater to one sales format and that’s a daily deals site. Our opportunity is to cater to other sales formats,” he said.